Just hopping on to concur:
"Apple could release their own iMessage client for Android if this were really about trusting beeper, but it's not. It's about using peer pressure with blue bubbles to sell more iPhones."
It's just that simple (and offensive).
First off, just want to thank you for the civil discourse. It's why we are here, right?
But in your rebuttal... keep in mind that the iPhone users are effected in as much as the only solution an iPhone user can currently offer (when their iPhone image is compressed to a nearly illegible degree after being sent to any non-iPhone user) is "maybe you should buy an iPhone like I did" or they have to use an entirely different system to resend the image (this latter solution being more inconvenient to the iPhone user).
As someone said below:
"Apple could release their own iMessage client for Android if this were really about trusting beeper, but it's not. It's about using peer pressure with blue bubbles to sell more iPhones."
I feel its either sunken-cost-fallacy-as-brand-ambassadorship or simply (yet another example of) bad faith arguments to support such underhanded "but... is it illegal?" behavior that borders on needing current anti-trust requirements to be reevaluated.